Lectures on Russian Literature
by Vladimir Nabokov · Mariner Books
Nabokov's Cornell lectures on Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gorky, edited from his notes with his diagrams and annotations. Rather than summarising plots, it models reading for detail, structure and style, including his famously hostile case against Dostoevsky.
This link may earn us a small commission at no extra cost to you. Affiliate disclosure
More resources on Russian Literature
The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel
Fourteen commissioned essays covering Pushkin through Bulgakov, Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn, organised by theme - the city, the countryside, politics, religion, gender, narrative technique - rather than author by author. Gives the map of the whole tradition that a single-author study cannot: thematic essays let a reader see why the Russian novel argues about God, land and politics the way it does. The 'guide to further reading' is the honest exit ramp into deeper scholarship. Includes a chronology.
The Brothers Karamazov - book-by-book lecture series
Fourteen recorded lectures walking through The Brothers Karamazov book by book, plus an introduction on Dostoevsky's life and a closing epilogue session. Reads the novel through its theological and philosophical arguments alongside a first reading. Covering one novel deeply beats a shallow survey.
Bloggers Karamazov - North American Dostoevsky Society
Official blog of the North American Dostoevsky Society, publishing interviews with scholars about new monographs, book reviews, conference notes and student essays. Useful for tracking live Dostoevsky scholarship and identifying specialists on particular novels. Bridges the gap between finishing a novel and reading journal articles - the author interviews explain what a new scholarly book argues and why, which is how a self-learner finds the next thing to read.
What's the best translation of The Brothers Karamazov?
The Pevear/Volokhonsky vs Garnett vs Katz argument is the single biggest practical obstacle to starting Russian literature, and this is the only free resource that shows the evidence - identical passages in parallel - instead of repeating hearsay. Side-by-side comparison of twelve English translations of The Brothers Karamazov, with opening-passage extracts, translator backgrounds and quoted assessments from reviewers and scholars. Companion pages cover Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina and War and Peace.
Crime and Punishment (translated by Oliver Ready)
Oliver Ready's 2014 Penguin translation, which reproduces the novel's nervous, colloquial register in period-plausible English rather than smoothing it. Frequently recommended over Garnett and Pevear/Volokhonsky as the most readable accurate way into Dostoevsky.
Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time
One-volume abridgement of Frank's five-volume biography, reading each novel against the Russian intellectual and political debates Dostoevsky was answering. Frank explains what Chernyshevsky, the Petrashevsky circle and the nihilist debates meant, so the novels stop reading as free-floating psychodrama. 984 pages; the standard scholarly account of why the fiction took the shape it did.